On 23rd of January, I applied for a new Idea postpaid connection and minutes later, I was given a new SIM card. I was told that it will take around 24 hours for the SIM to get activated. Next day morning when I checked, the SIM was inactive (Yes, I rebooted my phone). I thought let me call Idea customer care to check why it is not activated and what the current status is. I got the number ‘9844012345’ from ideacellular.com and I gave the call, selected option ‘2’ for English and then ‘9’ to speak with a customer care executive and here is the conversation:

CCE: <something in kannada>

me: (in English) I subscribed for new postpaid connection and the SIM is not activated yet.

CCE: Sir, this is prepaid ccare number. call 9844012345

me: thank you (I forgot that this is the same number to which I placed a call)

I quickly dialed the number 9844012345 (again) and here’s the conversation. The executive name is ‘meenakshi’

Meenakshi: <usual greeting>

me: I subscribed for new postpaid connection and the SIM is not activated yet.

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 16,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 6 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Some where in Q3 last year, when smartphone OS market share was announced by Gartner, There were not many changes at the Top of the Table, but at the bottom, two new OSes were fighting for their own honor, we had Microsoft with their Windows 7 and Samsung with their Bada OS. Perhaps what surprised most people was the fact that Bada OS was actually ahead of Microsoft which had huge hopes and expectations on their own OS. And not many expected Samsung to get upper hand over much hyped Windows Phone 7.

Some where in 2009 when Samsung announced Bada OS, few people realized the potential and moved away from Android which had problems of its own, but then the initial target of Samsung was the first time buyers who had no prior smartphone and feature phone experience. Bada 1.0 was more of a feature phone OS and although it did not have enough features, the handset {Wave I} was very advanced and attracted lot of buyers. Few months down the line, Samsung announced Bada 1.1 for entry level handsets and it did not impress the critics yet according to samsung met its expectation. Things went a step ahead when wave II was launched with a bigger screen and Bada 1.2 which solved the few niggles that the 1.0 had. But then again it lacked some basic features that the smartphone OS should be having, So not many were fond of Bada.

This is the first ever guest post on bandla.wordpress.com, done by Bala (twitter.com/yo_bala).

I have been using the Galaxy Tab 10.1″ close to 2 months. For once, This Tab is touted as one of the best Android Tabs in the Market and for sure it is.

My time with the tab was from when it was on Android 3.1 to now when it was recently updated to Android 3.2. This will not be a review because we there are enough reviews floating around. Instead I will try to write down as the tab being no where close to laptop replacement.

When I picked this tab, I had 2 other choices, Acer Iconia 501 and Xoom 3G. All of them were similarly priced but I picked this one ahead of the others cause it was more responsive and was better in terms of performance than the Iconia which had USB ports to it. Few days of using the galaxy tab, it was highly addictive and time consuming as I was enjoying the show. The Tablet’s performance ultimately depends on lots of factors and in my case I closed widgets and live wallpapers after a month and its performance increased considerably but on using widgets and live wallpapers it tend to use high memory close to 600 MB of the total 734 MB that is available. The tab generally performs well if I keep the memory usage below 500 MB but sometimes, tab lags even when the usage is around 350 MB {that’s the lowest I have seen}. This is a I bit surprising for me.

Hope you have liked the article on Motorola. This time, you get to learn about a brand that is going to celebrate 150 years in 2015. Yes, 150 years! They have not invented mobile but they gave us smartphone, they used to create devices that used to be at the center of attention in the 90’s and till late 2000s. I think you know what I am talking about.

PS: The first article on Motorola was huge and this time, I have decided to make it a bit easy to read and as short as possible. Happy reading.

12 May 1865

Fredrik Idestam, father of Finland’s paper industry was granted permission to build a paper mill and the mill construction was completed on the banks of Tammerkoski Rapids in Tampere, Finland in the year 1866. In the year 1868, he build another mill by the banks of the Nokianvirta river. Unlike today’s paper that is manufactured from wood pulp, till late 1860s, Europe used to manufacture paper using rag pulp (mix of linen and canvas rags, cotton rags were added later) which was expensive when compared to wood pulp. While Friedrich Gottlob Keller invented this method of manufacturing paper from wood pulp in 1844, it was Heinrich Voelter and Idestam were instrumental in bringing this manufacturing process to mass use. In the year 1867, Idestam was awarded a bronze medal for showcasing his groundwood while Voelter’s mill got the gold medal and this was the catalyst that they needed to increase usage of wood pulp based paper.